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I wish GNOME would have first made a GNOME 2.4 release which would have been GNOME 2.32 ported to GTK 3.
Instead of jumping at GTK 3 and GNOME 3 at the same time.

I think you've hit the nail on the head.

Aaron Seigo from KDE mentioned that they chief thing they learned from the 4.0 release, was that it wasn't wise to port the applications and DE in the same stroke. (Not to mention they also switched to Qt 4). Perhaps there is a limit to how many changes people are prepared to accept at once. It's fine if all the apps are different, if the desktop is still the same as the one you've always known an loved. And people can accept the lack of a menu button, if the apps are still the same.

I think that everyone has a person, internal limit that determines just how many changes they are prepared to accept at once before they're brain starts screaming at them that this is all a conspiracy to destroy everything they love in the world.

I love LXDE mostly because of;PCmanFM, lxterm and openbox. YMMV but when you get used to something it kinda becomes the way you look at how your PC should act. Lubuntu is beautiful as well for being a bloated (fully functional) Linux distro Michael, give it a shot will ya? KDE is beautiful no doubt, you should give it a chance as well. I have issues with it but I can't deny it's really cool.

I am on KDE on my work computer but whenever I have the chance I go to dwm. A project I have my eyes on however is Razor-qt which basically is an LXDE based on Qt.
I have always felt that Qt apps are nicer looking than their GTK counterparts.

e17 is nice too and now with the real release and the success of Bodhi, I hope we can see some evolution on that front too.
An e17/razor-Qt combo (rather than the more common e17/LXDE) could be interesting.

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Aaron Seigo from KDE mentioned that they chief thing they learned from the 4.0 release, was that it wasn't wise to port the applications and DE in the same stroke. (Not to mention they also switched to Qt 4). Perhaps there is a limit to how many changes people are prepared to accept at once. It's fine if all the apps are different, if the desktop is still the same as the one you've always known an loved. And people can accept the lack of a menu button, if the apps are still the same.

I think that everyone has a person, internal limit that determines just how many changes they are prepared to accept at once before they're brain starts screaming at them that this is all a conspiracy to destroy everything they love in the world.

Not only that, but it would have been nicer with an indeterminate release of GNOME 2 with GTK 3 because people might want to fork if they don't like GNOME 3.

If there were a GNOME 2.4 release with GTK 3 then MATE could be using GTK 3 instead of GTK 2 now, that would be nicer.

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I think that everyone has a person, internal limit that determines just how many changes they are prepared to accept at once before they're brain starts screaming at them that this is all a conspiracy to destroy everything they love in the world.

Well said.

Personally, I'm still waiting for Gnome to become as flexible and feature-rich as a simple XFCE+compiz combo. Otherwise I don't think it's that bad IF (!!) you buy into the whole usage pattern paradigm. If you don't, it makes you want to throw your hardware at the wall or out the window within minutes. In that respect it's very much like a commercial OS.

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The problem is, the offered paradigms don't "scale" if you have many windows open.

Sure, if you just have Firefox and Rhythmbox open, alt-tabbing is fine.

But if you have 10 or 12 windows open, the absolute easiest way is to commit to muscle memory exactly where the window is relative to the position of the others in your taskbar, and just move the mouse down there and click it.

to be honest, when I'm on linux I use the tiling manager/work spaces. I've two to three windows per work space (since there is a neat plug-in that advances the default tiling manager of Gnome3 that's pretty easy to do for more than two windows) and just go through the spaces when I've to.

I can remember more precisely on which space an application was simply because it was grouped with another application there (probably). I use alt-tab barely on gnome3. Only to switch between two terminal windows maybe (because none of those require me using the mouse)

I also never really liked the application switches. The bar was too full after a few hours of work and I always had to reach out for the mouse.

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So, not even considering KDE? I'd love to know your reasoning. I'm genuinely curious, since I have been using KDE at work for some time (on and off). I'd like to know what a Gnome user thinks about KDE.

Here's what a Gnome user who used KDE (4.2 - 4.6) for about 1 year thinks about KDE: It crashes a lot and is unpolished. For the longest time there were tiny visual bugs in apps, notifications, plasma, etc. that kept piling up over time, making the desktop experience look like Windows 98. Also I dislike that I need to spend 5 minutes configuring every new KDE program that I install (I know I'm exaggerating, but you get my point). My first impression coming from Gnome was that it was awesome and gave me all the power to configure what I wanted. Soon I realized that this meant spending lots of time configuring stuff, because of all this "power". It has great programs, but most of them are full of features that I never needed to use once. I also think that Gnome is exaggerating with the "simplification" business, but still most Gnome apps are easier to look at due to the lack of visual clutter, something that to me is important. I don't know how Calligra is doing, but KOffice was unusable due to the lack of text editing and spreadsheet features (ironic!). Things I liked about KDE: Dolphin, Digikam, KLauncher (I think it was the name... it's the "start menu") because at that time it was the better desktop integrated tool for quickly launching applications using the keyboard.

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Here's what a Gnome user who used KDE (4.2 - 4.6) for about 1 year thinks about KDE: (cut)

Agreed 100%. And having tried almost any linux desktop environment / window manager out there, I still find Gnome 3 a much better choice than the others (unless you're using an old pc, in which case I'd use xfce and/or openbox). Gnome 3 is fast and intuitive, works fine on my netbook (unlike KDE) and I can almost avoid using the mouse (unlike Gnome 2).